If a cyclist goes through a red light and no one is around to see it, is it wrong that they did?
What if there’s an aggressive driver behind you, one whom you would feel much safer being in front of if you could get a little head start on them? What if it’s a red light to co-ordinate the safe passing of finished but still coned-off roadworks, reducing two opposing lanes down to one that both directions now have to share, but there’s still space for a cyclist to dart between the bollards and continue on their way?
All of these examples highlight the nuance and importance of context around the topic of cyclists and red lights, a discussion at the intersection of community spirit, common sense, respect for the rule of law, personal and public safety, and morality.
For the United Kingdom, where moral panic around cyclists has been popular lately, the House of Lords last week held a Thursday lunchtime debate in Parliament over cycling safety. Terrible person Mario Cipollini was cited (presumably without knowledge that he’s been convicted of domestic abuse), while another ‘Lord’ suggested microchipping bikes as that works for his cat. Tom Davidson over at Cycling Weekly watched the whole thing being live-streamed and pulled the quotes if you’re after a hateful Wednesday read.
More interestingly/worryingly (delete as appropriate to your view), Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill – John, to give him his actual name – said the government would “certainly look at” a proposal made by Lord Hogan-Howe (AKA Bernard) to make “cycling offences endorsable on driving licences for motor vehicles.” Currently, there are no licences or points-based systems for cyclists; instead, you can be given a fine of between £50-£1,000 depending on the transgression, but if a motorist runs a red light, for example, they get three points ‘put’ on their licence. If you make it to 12, you lose your licence.
Some numbers for you: over a six-year period 20 pedestrians in the United Kingdom have been killed in collisions involving cyclists (not all of those 20 were incidents where the cyclist was necessarily at fault), while 2,941 pedestrians were injured by a cyclist, 546 seriously. Meanwhile, 26,890 fixed-penalty notices (usually £50, or US $66) were handed out over the same timeframe in the greater London area, although various other areas of the country saw no fines handed out over half a decade.
That sounds like a lot. But to put it in context, compare those six-year figures with the official UK Department of Transport figure of 1,711 fatalities and 28,031 more people seriously injured in crashes in a single year (2022), most of them in motor-vehicle collisions.
Whether or not the issue of cyclists breaking traffic laws is great enough to deserve discussion in Parliament is a matter of opinion. But why was it discussed? One answer could be that Hendy of Richmond Hill lives a stone’s throw away from Richmond Park in the south of the capital, a playground for cyclists away from the noise and fumes of city life and also a recent focus of safety concerns. Another theory, broader in assessing the level of hatred often experienced by cyclists, comes from Cycling UK trustee and lawyer Nadia Kerr: “There is a jealousy among drivers that cyclists seem to get away with things,” she told The Times of London, “but they can’t cause the same level of damage.”
With a quarter of adults aged 17 and over not holding a driving licence to penalise, as well as further regulation dissuading people from making a healthier, greener choice than taking a journey by car, there are holes in the idea. Luckily, there’s a whole wide world of ideas out there; what others can we consider?
Paris took the step in 2015 to allow cyclists to not stop at certain red lights, with signs showing stops where they can keep going, all in aid of increasing road safety in a city of drivers who have a penchant for putting their indicator on only after they start turning. Yikes.
So signs were put up featuring a red upside-down triangle containing a yellow bike and and arrow showing the way you can continue by bike: 1,800 of them at junctions across the capital. “What in effect we have done is turn the red light for cyclists into a give way sign,” Christophe Najdoski, then-deputy Paris mayor in charge of transport said at the time, effectively codifying longstanding behavior.
“It is also a way of regularising a practice that is so widespread there is no point in trying to prevent it,” he said. “As long as cyclists slow down, and if there are pedestrians they stop, then it is all perfectly safe.”
The rules change in Paris accompanied a massive reshaping of its urban street network, with over 800 km of new bike lanes and paths built since 2001 (for around 1,000 km total). The result: while there were 94 total fatalities in the greater Paris metropolitan area last year (population 7 million), just 33 of them were in the urban core, the area that is the focus of Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s ambitious plan to shift away from personal motor vehicles. There are some tensions – Paris now has bike traffic jams – but the experiment has largely been a success.
Paris’ adoption of yield-on-red saw them join Brussels and various German cities in introducing the practice, and even San Francisco considered it during a standoff between cyclists and police over a crackdown in traffic law obeyance. Nine years later, San Francisco introduced legislation allowing cyclists to legally cross a street on a pedestrian walk signal, instead of waiting for the traffic light to turn green.
In America, more than 40 years after Idaho birthed the eponymous “Idaho stop,” allowing cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs and red lights as stop signs, Delaware fashioned their own “Delaware Yield” in 2017. To date, Washington, DC, and nine other states besides Delaware (Arkansas, Oregon, Washington, Utah, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Colorado, Minnesota and Alaska) have adopted either full or partial Idaho stop laws that now govern 11.6% of the total American population.
There’s solid science underlying these shifts. University of Colorado-Denver professor Wes Marshall published research in 2017 that found that 70% of the reasoning behind cyclists breaking traffic laws was in order to stay safe; by contrast, when drivers broke traffic laws it was largely for convenience and time-saving reasons.
What about our friends Australia? Well, congrats you guys all the way down there, apparently you have relatively low red-running infringement rates of 7-9% (Brazil checks in at 38.4%, China: 56%).
“I am traditionally a very law-abiding bicyclist,” one Australian told me. “Although if there’s no-one around or it’s the middle of the night I might sneak a lil’ something.
“When anyone can see, I am rigidly lawful, because I don’t want to be the ‘Once I saw a cyclist run a red light,’ in some [redacted] anti-bike screed.”
Which nicely illustrates the point here. Laws like the one ol’ Lord Hendy has proposed continue to centre drivers in our cities, and give those drivers inspiration for the sort of us-vs-them angst that led to the parliamentary debate in the first place.
The data points to a better way, but so does common sense. Go to Paris today and it’s a different vibe entirely from a decade ago. Cyclists and pedestrians have regained their rightful place at the city’s heart and many of last decade’s drivers are now on two wheels. People on bikes — commuters, families, tourists on Lime bikes — are no longer the “other,” in the way, scofflaws running lights. The city is now designed for them. These forward-thinking cities, where moving around outside a car is easy and relatively safe, are rethinking their infrastructure and yes, their laws, to make it clear that we’re all just trying to get somewhere in one piece.
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